ership of the Islamic Center on Massa- chusetts Avenue and a group of militant pro-Khomeini Iranians and African- American Muslims On April 2nd, the director and the assistant director of the center told police that the revolutionary faction was threatening a violent take- over of the mosque. Salahuddin and Nahidian were thought to be the ring- leaders. The polIce feared that the trou- ble at the mosque might be a ploy to in- cite police action against Muslims and generate the kind of television images- Muslims at worship being attacked by hehneted police in the nation's capital- that would jeopardize the American hostage situation in Tehran and set off an international call to arms. S alahuddin described himself as a "time bomb," whose raging anger was harnessed by the Iranian govern- ment. When the emissary from Tehran approached Salahuddin about killing Tabatabai, he said he tried without suc- cess to get the emissary to authorize him to assassinate two Americans instead. "If you want to make an impact, you don't kill an exiled Iranian," he said he told the emissary. "That's not a big deal." He did not disclose that he had already done his "homework" on the two other targets: Kermit Roosevelt, a former C.I.A. offi- cial who had helped bring the Shah to power, in 1953; and Henry Kissinger, whom he had pinpointed because of Kissinger's involvement in the bombing of Cambodia and the coup against Sal- vador Allende, in Chile. "Did you ever see footage of the attack on Allende in the Presidential Palace?" Salahuddin asked me in Tehran. "Why is that O.K., but an attempt on the White House is a mark of unutterable inhumanity?" I asked Salahuddin what he thought he wotÙd have accomplished by assassi- nating Kissinger. "It's like this-you deal with a bully;" he began. "You go to school the first day, a guy takes your lunch money; and that's going to go on every day of the year until you do something to him that will discourage that kind of behavior." He added that even though he knew there was "an excellent chance" that he would get shot by Kissinger's bodyguards, he was prepared to go ahead. "} don't see myself as being in love With danger," he wrote in an e-mail, but "the excitement of it is a psychic 30 THE NEW YOR.KER., AUGUST 5,2002 drug and in the midst of potential life- and-death circumstances you under- stand what it is to be alive." Salahuddin discovered, in his early years in Iran, that even though he be- lieved in violent jihad, there were limits to his militancy: In the eighties, he said, a branch of Iranian military intelligence asked him to hijack planes, but, he said, "there is something about being trapped inside of something that I wotÙd not give in to." He added, "I might do other things if it's just bang and gone, but the idea of keeping people under pressure. . . . " Salahuddin says that he has received no direct payments from the Iranian government aside from the five thou- sand dollars for killing T abatabai. "Some people believe that I am on some special government payroll, but no one has ever given me a sinecure job in Tehran, nor have I ever been subsidized in any mean- ingful way." He said that he worked briefly for the Revolutionary Guards as an English teacher; that he was the mod- erator, last year, of a twice-weekly news program on Iranian television; and that for nine years he was an editor, editorial writer, and war correspondent for one of Tehran's four English-language news- papers. Salahuddin told me that in Feb- ruary; 1991, he went to Iraq to cover the Gulf War and obtained an interview with Abu Abbas, the Palestinian terror- ist who led the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro. Salahuddin also travelled in the mili- tant Muslim world as a kind of diplomat for Said Ramadan: "I presented myself as Ramadan's envoy; and that was with his encouragement." Salahuddin wrote that in 1986 he made "certain represen- tations on behalf of Ramadan to Muam- mar dda:fi" through one of dda:fi's cousins, and in 1995 he said he delivered a message from Ramadan to President Burhanuddin Rabbani, in Mghanistan, warning him that the Taliban had ties to the C.I.A. From December of 1986 to May of 1988, Salahuddin said, he served in Mghanistan as a soldier with the mujahideen. In 1993, shortly after the first bomb- ing of the World Trade Center, when intelligence agents were desperate for in- formation, a former intelligence detec- tive named Carl Shoffler, who served with federal agents on an interagency counter-terrorism task force in Wash- ington, got in touch with Salahuddin. DetectIve Tom Cauffiel, of the Mont- gomery County police department, told me, "Carl figured that Dawud might be one of the few people who knew what the bombing was about, and might know what else was on the agenda, what h " ot er targets. Salahuddin began a back-channel re- lationship with American authorities and talked about returning to the United States to stand trial in the murder of Tabatabai. "I was serious about it at the time," Salahuddin acknowledged, "and Carl was the one guy who might have brought me home." " Th . d " C ffi I . d " e 1 ea, au e saJ. , was to use the leverage of the murder to find out what he knows." Salahuddin told Shof- fler that the bombing was direcdy re- lated to the United States military pres- ence in Saudi Arabia-an inflammatory issue among radical Muslims. On March 5, 1994, at Shoffler's urg- ing, Salahuddin sent a letter to Attorney GeneralJanet Reno. It was his only for- mal contact with the United States gov- ernment. In the letter, he laid out his terms "for mediating between the U.S. and certain key figures in the worldwide Islamic movement" and for providing information on some of his "work" for Iran. "The price for this service is free- dom from all prosecution to the charges I face in the Bethesda affair," Salahud- din wrote the Attorney General. Sala- huddin said that he never received an answer from Reno or from anyone else. A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said that no record of Salahud- din's letter exists. In 1996, before a deal cotÙd be worked out, Shoffler died of pancreatitis, and Salahuddin's interest in surrendering faded. He learned of Shoffler's death in an e-mail from a former C.I.A. officer named Jack Platt. "I went through the files and got the e-mail address that Carl was using," Platt told me. Salahuddin, he said, sent him back an e-mail and then called: "He was very distraught. Two times he said, 'I just can't believe it,' and I said, 'Well, you just have to.' " I n May of 2001, Salahuddin resur- faced in an unlikely way: as an actor in the Iranian film "Kandahar," which was shown at the 2001 Cannes Fùm Festival and released worldwide soon